An illustration from the Joplin Globe invoking the spirit of progress that pervaded much of Joplin’s history.
Source: Joplin Globe
Death of a Soiled Dove
Joplin’s North End was riddled with “immoral resorts” filled with young women. Mamie Johnson was one of many who walked the streets of Joplin. Her life tragically came to an end at the age of thirty-three after she abandoned her husband of four years and two children and took up the profession of a scarlet woman. But her life as a lady of the night must have worn her down, for in the end Mamie’s life was cut short by her own hand.
Mamie, whose real name was allegedly Minerva Rickey, was the daughter of a “well-to-do” farmer from the Kansas City. At a young age she eloped with John Gordon, a young farmer, and settled down. After four years and two children, however, Mamie left her family and strolled into Joplin and a life of vice. Shortly before her death, she had confided to an aunt who lived in Joplin that her husband had mistreated her. The two had reportedly divorced.
One day life was too much for Mamie to bear and she overdosed on ten cent dose of morphine. She was discovered in her room by Frank Wilsey, a laundryman for the Empire Steam Laundry, when he dropped off a bundle of clothes at her room. Word quickly spread throughout Joplin’s tenderloin district and “many touching scenes were witnessed as the unfortunate creatures crowded about and gazed upon the face of their dead sister.” A letter was found in her room addressed to Bessie Blair.
The text of the letter read,
“Joplin, Mo. July, 27, 1898.
Dear Friend Bessie:
I will write this for you and leave it for you. I may not get to talk to you or see you anymore. But my bedroom suit you can have for that fine, but give my clothes to my aunt. That is all I want, but would like for you to come as I want to send word home. I would like for you to see them as soon as possible, for my clothes, my trunk, and things is all I ask of you to let them have. Well, I am satisfied and hope you will be. Tell them to go down to the wash woman’s and give up three dollars for clothes there. I would like to have my aunt come as soon as you get this note.
Do not think nothing as you know what caused it. You will not be out nothing as my folks will take care of me. I suppose you will be satisfied when you see, anyway. You have been a friend to me and not a friend. And I hope when the girls see this they will take warning by me. Bessie, it is hard to do, but I cannot help it. I hope you will be satisfied with Minnie [Mamie’s roommate] as she is a good girl, and will treat you right. I send my love and best regards and hope you will not take a foolish idea like I have took. Kiss them all for me. Tell Pearl she is all right. Time is drawing near and will have to close.
Good bye.
from your Mamie Gordon to my dear friend Bess, 1,000 kisses to all you I will go to hell tonight.”
Interestingly, the letter was dictated by Mamie to her lover, Ernest Boruff, who testified at the coroner’s inquest that the two had quarreled a few weeks earlier after some of his clothes went missing. They quarreled again after he wrote the letter for her and he subsequently left. He claimed that he did not suspect Mamie had suicidal intent and swore that she “was not in the habit of using morphine.” Bessie Blair also testified at the coroner’s inquest and stated that Mamie had threatened suicide several times during the past month.
After Mamie Gordon’s funeral, the coroner’s jury issued the following verdict:
“We, the jury, find that Mamie Gordon came to her death form an overdose of drugs, taken by herself presumably with suicidal intent.”
W.M. Whiteley, Coroner
Dave K. Weir
Samuel Cox
A.C. James
J.M. Graham
Ed Trimble
A. Malang
Life as a prostitute was not a happy one, and more likely than not, one that women simply fell into due to misfortune and bad circumstance. At least some had addictions to cocaine or morphine, and as Mamie Gordon’s letter warned, one that could easily end in the death of a soiled dove.
Source: Joplin Globe
The Reminiscences of G.O. Boucher — Part I
In the early months of 1910, a Globe reporter stopped by the home of G.O. Boucher at the corner of Joplin and Twentieth Streets to interview him about historic Joplin. Boucher gladly obliged him. Here at Historic Joplin our philosophy is to allow the voices of the past speak for themselves in their own words with as little interference as possible, even if we abhor the usage of some of the language used. For those sensitive to the use of racial slurs, it may be for the best to skip this entry as it does include some graphic language. What follows are Boucher’s recollections in his own words as they appeared in the Joplin Globe.
“I came from Mineralville in the spring of 1871 in company with John Sergeant, at that time a partner of E.R. Moffet. They were the first men to start the wheel rolling for the building of the present city of Joplin. Among the men who were interested in this undertaking were Pat Murphy and W.P. Davis who laid out the first forty acres in town lots, on which the largest and most valuable buildings of the city now stand.
The first air furnace built in the Joplin mining district was constructed by Moffet and Sergeant. T. Casady, a man from Wisconsin, handled the first pound of mineral which was smelted in this district in the mill erected by them. The smelter was located in the Kansas City Bottoms between East and West Joplin. A. Campbell, H. Campbell, A. McCollum, and myself were the first smelter employees in this district. The fuel used in the smelter was cordwood and dry fence rails, which were hauled from the surrounding country. The first men who handled rails and sold to the smelters were Warren Fine and Squire Coleman, the latter now living in Newton County.
The hotel accommodations at that time were poor and the first ‘beanery’ was a 24×16 foot shack erected by H. Campbell. His family occupied the house and they boarded the smelter crew. We found sleeping quarters wherever we could find room to pitch our tents. the boys would stretch their tents and then forage enough straw to make a bed and this was the only home known to them. E.R. Moffet and myself slept in the smelter shed on a pile of straw and for some time we slept in the furnace room on the same kind of bed. About the last of August of the same year Mr. Campbell erected what was then quite a building. It was two stories high, four rooms on the ground floor, and two above. This was at the southwest corner of Main and First Streets, now called Broadway. Just about this time Davis and Murphy began the erection of a store building just across the street from the hotel.
Another early hotel was the Bateman hotel, moved from Baxter, Kansas, to Joplin in 1872. It promptly burned down three years later.
Speaking of the first business building erected in Joplin, William Martin built a 16×16 box building on Main Street between First and Second Streets and put in about $125 worth of groceries and a small load of watermelons. Soon after this, a man known as ‘Big Nigger Lee’ established a grocery store on the opposite side of the street from Martin. He put in a larger stock but did not have as good a trade as Martin on account of having no watermelons. Some of the older residents remember ‘Big Nigger’ Lee as he was in business here for several years.”
More to come from the reminiscences of G.O. Boucher and in the future, Historic Joplin will address the issue of racism in Joplin to provide a clearer picture of how hatred affected the city’s African American citizens.
Source: Joplin Globe, “A History of Jasper County, Missouri, and Its People,” by Joel T. Livingston.
A Hello Girl Finds Love
Turn on your television and you’re likely to be bombarded by advertisements for EHarmony, Match.Com, and OKCupid. Love can now be found on the Internet, but finding love with someone you cannot see over lines of communication is nothing new. Here is one story that happened over the telephone line, many years ago.
Miss Lillian Imogene Chittenden, a Hello Girl for the Home Telephone Company just over the state line in Galena, Kansas, found love over the wires. When Alexander Morford, the mining editor for the Joplin Globe, discovered that the Galena line was down, he panicked. He had to find a way to transmit a story from Galena to Joplin as quickly as possible. Through the introduction of a friend he met Lillian Chittenden who helped him successfully transmit his story on time.
From that time forward Morford “demonstrated a great interest in the telephone business. As time progressed, Morford was promoted and transferred to the Globe‘s Joplin offices. It was said of Morford, “as long as the Galena-Joplin toll service continued in operation, he hadn’t talked himself out of range and the romance of the telephone and The Globe went steadily forward.”
The two married at the Christian Church of Galena, Kansas, in December 1905. Their marriage lasted until Alexander Morford’s death on February 9, 1953, in Joplin, Missouri.
Source: Joplin Globe
Globe Coverage of the Joplin Supply Company
On Saturday, the Joplin Globe ran an article about the Joplin Supply Company. The one time location where later on Ford Model Ts were built within and moved within the building by large elevators. That building is now one of the historic locales receiving the renovation treatment.
The article here.
Below is a photograph of one of the earlier locations for the company on Fourth Street. The parking lot adjacent to the former Federal building and located behind the library is all one will see if they attempt to hunt down this building today.
The Joplin Supply Company building at Fourth and Wall Streets.
Source: Historic Joplin
The Pawn Shop on the Corner
The Joplin of today has numerous pawn shops dotting its streets and thoroughfares. Perhaps the most iconic pawnshop is that of Ben Milgram on Main Street. Pawn shops, however, were in downtown Joplin long before Milgram set up shop.
According to one turn-of-the-century account of Joplin pawn shops, people pawned the coats off of their backs for twenty-five to fifty cents. One pawn shop owner reported that a man had come into his store and asked to speak to the owner in the back. Embarrassed, the man asked the pawn shop proprietor if he “could get a loan on a good pair of shoes.”
Another Joplin pawn broker told the story of one of his repeat customers, an elderly African-American woman who often pawned her solid gold dental crown for money. According to the broker, she would enter his shop, take off her dental crown, wrap it up in a piece of paper, and then get her money. She reportedly had done this so often that the store owner rarely ever checked the paper to see if the crown was in it or not. One pawn shop operator on Third Street related the story of a man who burst into his store, pulled out his dentures, and asked “Say, mister, what’ll give me for these?”
A representative view of a pawn shop from the time period, though not a Joplin pawn shop.
Men were not the only ones to patronize the pawn shops of Joplin. Women were known to “buy diamonds one day and come back to the same place and pawn them the next.” One woman reportedly pawned her wedding rings in order to pay for the cost of a divorce. Another woman pawned her expensive silk dress to get enough money to pay her brother’s rent after he fell ill and was unable to work. Fortunately she was able to reclaim her dress within a few days. One pawn broker remarked, “Yes, I’ve all sorts of things offered me; shoes, shirts, coats, and hats to diamonds and false teeth, and I wouldn’t be surprised to have a woman come in and want to borrow money on her false hair.”
Thus, a drive down Joplin’s Main street with pawnshops on the corner isn’t a recent phenomenon, but an experience shared with residents of Joplin that stretches back a century.
Sources: Library of Congress and the Joplin Globe.
Joplin’s Hello Girls
In 1905, Joplin residents who picked up the phone to place a call would have heard a cheerful “Hello Central!” Joplin’s “Hello Girls” were said to be a “combination of encyclopedia, dictionary, city directory, blue book, weather vane, atlas, human alarm clock, and bureau of information in general.” Altogether there were thirty-five young women who were responsible for directing calls in the city of Joplin. Twenty-two of the telephone operators were assigned to the main line and answered an estimated 16,000 calls per day.
Some of Joplin's Hello Girls likely worked at the Bell Telephone Company's building.
One night operator on the Bell line of the Missouri & Kansas Telephone Company spoke with a Joplin Globe reporter regarding an average work night. “Oh, they just ask everything,” the operator replied when asked what people asked when making a call. “So many people ring up to ask when the next street car goes to Carthage, or to Galena, and whether the East Joplin dinky is running today. Then there’s the trains. It would be folly for a central operator not to know the exact time of departure from and arrival of every train in Joplin, and if we don’t want to get our heads taken off by an information craving public, we’d better known just how late that Frisco from the west is tonight, and whether the Katy carries passengers on its local freight.”
It was also not uncommon for folks to pick up the phone to find out the time of day. The operator slyly remarked that she believed some folks did so just to save on the price of an office clock. Joplin residents also picked up the phone to find out where a fire was, often ringing up the operator to gasp, “Where’s the fire, Central?”
Although an operator might receive a dozens of calls on a night when the fire alarms rang incessantly, at least one operator did not mind the inquisitive phone calls, telling the Globe reporter, “We all sort of have a mutual interest in fires, and it’s a sort of human weakness, I’ll admit, to realize that we are very important for once in our little lives. It makes us sort of proud, you see, and we just answer away with might and main telling them all where the fire alarm came from.”
Other common questions the operators received were regarding the dates and times of church services, the location of specific mines, the meaning of words, the authors of books, and even “what the sign is when you dream you saw your fellow.”
Operators displayed patience with their customers, especially in the case of the elderly who were often hesitant to speak into a phone and would forget who they wanted to speak to, including one older lady who would call up and say, “Oh, I want to talk to a woman, she lives out on, oh, I forgot the street and I can’t think of her name. She’s a milliner.”
This unnamed telephone operator from 1911 is representative of telephone operators of the time.
Besides patience, an encyclopedic knowledge of train schedules, businesses, and people, the other essential quality needed in a “Hello Girl” was youth. Acting Secretary H.E. Scovern of the Home Telephone Company told the reporter that, “It’s not altogether an easy thing to secure the desirable sort of operators. We have them here from fifteen years up, but the girl of seventeen makes the very best. She’s quick and alert and readily learns the run of the business and the professional men the line caters to. She must know them all, and there are something like 1,300 phones to keep in mind.” Scovern said a “Hello Girl” had the instinct of Sherlock Holmes and the cunning of an expert in the dead letter department at the Post Office. He praised one operator who, through her extensive memory and ability to analyze voices, could detect “fraudulent use of the toll board exchange” and despite the many “rag chewings and some unpleasantness” proved a “valuable guardian of the company’s interests.”
Sources: Library of Congress and the Joplin Globe.
Joplin, Phone Home
Alexander Graham Bell filed his patent for the telephone in 1876. Six years later, telephones were considered a rare luxury and this list reveals some of the wealthier citizens of Joplin, as well the most successful businesses. Even with a population in the thousands and businesses in at least the dozens, only about 51 telephones are listed. Times have changed.
Jopin Telephone Exchange List for 1882.
Source: Joplin Daily Herald
From Fire: The Origin of the Joplin Fire Department
Fires today still make the headlines, but the risk to communities as a whole are not as significant as they were one hundred years ago. Before the emergence of professional fire fighters with modern training and equipment, fires posed a considerable risk to towns and cities populated by wooden structures and defended by brave but untrained bucket brigades. Joplin, like many other cities across the country, learned the hard way of the necessity of a professionally trained and equipped fire department. As one would expect, this story of historic Joplin begins with a fire.
More than thirty years had passed, but the crusty pioneers who witnessed the city’s birth still recalled the first great blaze that occurred in 1874. Only a year old, Joplin was just beginning to build on the success of the mines. For a city in its infancy, the fire was incredibly destructive. Joplin’s volunteer fire department, formed in 1872, was headed by Edward Porter. Porter oversaw a ragtag collection of twenty men who rode on horseback to fires carrying only their axes and water buckets. It was this small, determined band of men who were able to beat back the fire of 1874. Despite the volunteer fire department’s best efforts, an entire block on Broadway was lost, which at the time consisted of two residences and a store room. The only building that survived the blaze was the Masonic Hall which was built of brick. The potential for devastation had been great and had only been narrowly avoided. The limited success of the volunteer fire department convinced Joplin’s city leaders that something had to be done to improve the department’s ability to combat fires.
The answer was a 100 gallon tank filled with a chemical fire suppressant set on the back of a handcart. It was stored in Joplin City Hall which at the time was situated in the bottoms that lay roughly in the middle of town, or rather, between the two former towns of Joplin and Murphysburg that had combined only a few years before. The fire suppressant’s record was mixed. A year after its purchase, it failed to stop a fire that burned down two homes, including one on Mineral Street that belonged to John Allington. This defeat may have been made even more embarrassing as Allington was an influential resident.
A bucket, like the one featured in this photograph from the time period, was one of the main tools available to combat fires.
By this time, Edward Porter had resigned from the position of volunteer fire chief and was succeeded by Frank Williams. It was Williams who was likely in charge when a destructive fire rampaged through near what is now Joplin’s Murphysburg neighborhood. At that time, the main financial district ran from First Street to Fourth with a few homes located south of Seventh Street. The heart of the commercial district was situated at the intersection of Third and Main, but buildings extended south to the corner of Fourth Street and Main, where the Worth Block building later stood. The Joplin News Herald described the fire thus:
“At an early hour one morning two of the buildings in the middle of the block were discovered to be in flames. The alarm was given and the volunteer company turned out. The fire had a good headway and before any efforts could be made to check its spread the center of the row was ablaze.”
It did not take long for the volunteers to realize that the buildings that made up the majority of the block between Third and Main were lost. Built entirely of wood frame construction, a fire could not have asked for any better source of fuel. Firefighters began a valiant effort to save the buildings located at opposite corners of the block as they were considered cornerstones that anchored their respective intersections. Onlookers crowded to watch the fire feed upon the block’s buildings and the fight by the firefighters to save the corner buildings. The firefighters succeeded in their desperate battle but the center of the block was reduced to charred ashes. The next great fire came four years later in 1880 at the famed White Lead Works of Joplin.
The White Lead Works arose from the idea of E.O. Bartlett, a young professor from Pennsylvania. Bartlett believed the process of smelting lead at the time was a wasteful one that allowed lead carbonate to be lost in the exhaust fumes. To curb waste, Bartlett devised a redesigned exhaust system that tripped a flour-like substance, commonly known as white lead. Bartlett requested the permission of Joplin’s largest lead producers to build his experimental lead factory on their site which would use his new exhaust system. The owners, E.R. Moffett and John B. Sergeant, agreed to the idea. Such was the success of Professor Bartlett’s plan that Moffett and Sergeant quickly implemented the process in their primary lead factories. White lead quickly became a valuable commodity due to its use as a paint pigment and was even used by the United States Navy to paint their ships. It was also commonly used in house paint and posed a great threat to the health of children who might consume the paint flakes.
It was late in the afternoon on April 3, 1880, that a great column of white smoke rose upward into the sky. If that was not enough to garner the attention of the people of Joplin, then the constant shrill screams of the plant’s steam whistles certainly did. Something was wrong. Perhaps someone had stacked the sacks of white lead too tightly together and the cumulative heat of the contents had reached a critical point where the bags had burst into flame. At least, that was the theory settled upon later, but at the moment, all that was known were shouts in the streets of Joplin, “The white lead works are on fire!” The white lead works employed a significant number of the city’s population and an even greater number arrived to watch it burn and look for loved ones that worked there.
The white lead works of Joplin after they were rebuilt following the devastating fire.
Moffett, who was at work at the time, coolly remarked, “Well, she’s gone.” Moffett and Sergeant’s employees had been at their posts with the factory running at full capacity when the fire started. Fortunately, employees were quickly evacuated and Moffett was credited with keeping the crisis in check. All that remained was for the fire department to attempt to save the factory. It was a lost cause before the department even arrived. Joplin’s volunteer firefighters failed due to the enormity and hazardousness of the blaze and they nearly lost the fire department’s chemical tank after it became trapped between two buildings. The overall loss was valued at $20,000, a great sum in 1880.
It was a jarring loss for both the city and its growing economy. The white lead works would be rebuilt, twice its former size, but the city recognized the need to reorganize the volunteer fire department. Volunteer Fire Chief Frank Williams may have stepped down at this point and handed the reins over to Taylor Mayfield, although it is not clear. The city ordered water hoses for the department to use and requested that every business keep a barrel of water and bucket handy. The city also asked for additional volunteers. It would be another fire the same year that spurred the city to continue its efforts to modernize the fire department.
During the late hours of the morning the city’s sole opera house, the Blackwell, erupted in flames. Rouse from their sleep at two in the morning, volunteers valiantly tried to save the large three story structure that lined fifty feet of Joplin’s Main Street. Located just north of the city’s courthouse, the flames could easily leap to the next building and destroy the civil center of the community. Clark Claycroft, a volunteer at the time and later a fire chief, recalled, “We tried our chemical tank but the fire was too much for that, and the bucket brigade did but little better.” As the flames consumed the Blackwell, volunteers recalled the fire hoses that lay inside the fire barn nearby, having arrived only the day before.
“So a bunch of us went to the fire barn, broke open the boxes, and put the hoses together and carried it to the fire. In half an hour, we had two streams of water going.” It was not enough to save the opera house. The Blackwell was lost, but the efforts did protect Joplin’s City Hall which briefly caught fire. The damage was severe and pushed Joplin’s city leaders to continue to improve the volunteer fire department.
Clark Claycroft was selected as fire chief with former city marshal J.W. Lupton appointed as his second in command. Three hose companies were established with their own stations. George Payton, a future fire chief, oversaw Station One located in East Joplin. Station Two stood at Second and Joplin and was commanded by A.B. “Tony” McCarty, and further south, at Seventh and Main, Station Three was overseen by L.A. Fillmore. It was this foundation upon which the Joplin Fire Department was built upon when George Payton became the first paid fire chief at $50 a year. The year was either 1882 or 1884 as various sources dispute the founding date.
Before the adaptation of the automobile, horse drawn carries were the main method for the Joplin Fire Department to move their fire fighting equipment about the city.
By 1890, the city’s water works had been expanded and improved upon which assisted the fire department with one hundred pounds of water pressure. Up to and past 1900, the companies used horse drawn carriages to respond to fire alarms, but one man would change that. Alfred Webb of Joplin, who operated an automobile livery across the street from one of the fire stations, revolutionized fire fighting. With permission of the fire chief, he mounted one of the chemical tanks and some hose on a motor car and a new era of fighting fires was born. The mechanized apparatus, dubbed “The Goat,” raced swiftly to the scene of fires, and often times was, as Joplin historian Joel Livingston reported, “ready to return when the hose company, drawn by horses, arrived on the scene.” By 1908, the city equipped all its stations with the motorized units and was perhaps one of the first cities to take such a step in the first years of the twentieth century.
The motorized Joplin Fire Department with its two ladder trucks, chemical truck, and fire chief's engine.
This innovation even made the pages of a 1909 issue of Popular Mechanics, which reported on the “up-to-date fire fighting machines.” The four cylinder gas engines of the cars also powered the pumps and worked at a furious 75 horse power. The chief fire engine carried a thousand feet of hose and numerous four gallon tanks of chemical suppressant, in addition to a water pump. The chemical engine, as it was called, hauled a sixty gallon tank, 200 feet of hose, and was powered by only a 25 horse power engine. In addition, the department owned two ladder trucks powered by 50 horsepower four cylinder engines which carried a thousand feet of hose, plus two 30 foot extension ladders.
Another view of the fire chief's engine and chemical engine of the Joplin Fire Department.
The Joplin Fire Department's two ladder trucks racing on a track.
From a small crew of twenty volunteers with buckets and axes to a modernized fleet of fire engines, the Joplin Fire Department entered the new century. Despite the hazards it had already faced, it was not until 1923 when the department lost its first fireman, one of four honored by the department for their service and sacrifice.
Joplin City Hall, which also housed the Joplin Fire Department station. Note the ladder truck on the right.
Sources: “A History of Jasper County, Missouri, and It’s People,” by Joel T. Livingston, Popular Mechanics, “The Story of Joplin” by Dolph Shaner, “Tales about Joplin…Short and Tall,” by Evelyn Milligan Jones, the Library of Congress, and the Joplin News Herald.
Death in the Mines
Lead and zinc mining was the heart and soul of early Joplin. Men toiled in the mines to earn their living or, in many cases, meet their end. There were a variety of ways that death came to those who worked in the mines, often sudden and very violent.
On June 13, 1901, the Carterville Record reported that T. Hibler, a mining engineer working in nearby Galena, fell into a mine shaft over one hundred feet deep while walking to work at 5:30 a.m. Perhaps it was simply luck, or maybe the manner in which the unfortunate engineer tumbled downward into the darkness, but Hibler survived the fall. Not only did Lady Luck spare his life, but shortly after, a passerby came to his rescue. Amazingly, Hibler suffered only a few cuts, bruises, and a sprained ankle. He was one of the fortunate as others were not so lucky.
A mine with chat pile looming beside it.
In James Norris’ “AZn: A History of the American Zinc Company” he noted that “In 1897 soaring prices and continued active demand produced large profits for miners in the Joplin zinc-ore district, and the following year was one of the most prosperous in the history of zinc mining.” This boom in lead and zinc mining attracted the attention of wealthy Eastern investors. In 1899, a group of Boston capitalists formed a corporation they called American Zinc, Lead, and Smelting Company. American Zinc, as it was commonly known, became one of the major players in the Tri-State Mining District.
In 1902, Harry S. Kimball was sent to Joplin to evaluate the company’s prospects in Joplin. He later recalled that Joplin was a, “bleak prospect for a tenderfoot to see as his first contact with a mining camp.” Hugh chat and slag piles littered the landscape. Miners were using “relatively simple and inefficient” mining methods. Thus men who were on the cusp of a century that heralded rapid technological and industrial innovations were operating as if they were still in the Dark Ages.
An example of the primitive technology at play in the mining fields. Here a hand-powered jig.
Historian Arrell M. Gibson describes the various mining techniques used in the Joplin area in his book, “Wilderness Bonanza.” Shafting, which required miners to create a vertical access shaft into the earth, was dangerous work. Miners drilled openings into the rock face and then inserted sticks of dynamite into the holes in order to break up solid rock. Dynamite, if handled incorrectly, was deadly. Miners sometimes had to tamp sticks into place. This involved tapping the explosive material into a firmer or deeper position. If they neglected to use a wooden stick to tamp in the dynamite, often using a metal bar instead, it could create sparks and cause a premature explosion with devastating effect.
Adding to the danger, miners also used giant powder, which was more powerful than regular black powder, to break up solid rock surfaces. Gibson states that many miners complained that giant powder caused headaches and nausea. But if a miner was fortunate enough not to die in a mine collapse, premature explosion, or suffocate, there was a good chance he would die early from silicosis. Silicosis is a condition caused by breathing in crystalline silica dust. After a controlled explosion, miners often failed to wet down the rock and as a result, inhaled minute particles of rock dust, which damaged their lungs like invisible razorblades piercing through their lung tissue. Miners who suffered from silicosis experienced shortness of breath, coughing, fever, and even a changing of the color of their skin. Of the many miners who eventually succumbed to the manufactured disease, one was Oscar C. Rosebrough. The thirty-six-year-old miner died of “miner’s consumption” in the summer of 1917.
Miners posing for a photograph within the dangerous confines of the mine.
Other deaths came suddenly and mercifully for some. The Carl Junction Standard reported on September 12, 1903, Walter McMahan was telling jokes and laughing with his coworkers at the Edith Mine near Joplin when a large boulder fell from the mine roof and crushed him. Meanwhile, The Carthage Evening Press recounted the death of Riley Marley, who was killed when he and his partner set off two shots of blast in a mine shaft. When one of the shots failed to go off, the two men reentered the mine to re-tamp the shot. As Marley tamped the shot back into place it exploded and drove the tamping rod through his head. He died instantly. His partner was blinded by the blast but survived.
Much of the danger came from simply entering the mines or processing areas. In 1905, Nathan Rice was struck on the top of his head by a falling timber. He later died of his injuries. In 1916, John Campbell was killed when he got caught in a drill rig. In 1882, Johnie Craig died when he went into a mine contaminated by bad air. In 1920, Kenneth Everett, a five year old child, died from bad air in an abandoned mine shaft.
Far more complex than the hand jig, it's not hard to understand the danger of working around this steam powered jig.
Close calls were common and sometimes bizarre. In 1902, William Morgan was injured while working in the Big Six Mine when an icicle fell from the top of a mine shaft and hit him in the back. The icicle was heavy enough that it fractured his shoulder blade, but the physician who tended Morgan expected his patient to recover.
The zinc and lead of Joplin brought great wealth to some, work to many, and danger to all who entered the mines to retrieve it.
Sources: “Mine Accidents and Deaths In the Southwestern Area of Jasper County, Missouri, 1868-1906,” Volume I. Compiled by Webb City Area Genealogical Society. “Mine Accidents and Deaths In the Southwestern Area of Jasper County, Missouri, 1907-1923,” Volume II, “Accidents, Deaths, and Other Events.” Compiled by Webb City Area Genealogical Society. “Wilderness Bonanza” by Arrell M. Gibson
